Akita Business Solutions - Suppliers of Continuous Inks systems (CISS) and Bulk Ink for Canon, Epson and HP

Installing Continuous Ink Supply Systems (CISS)
for Epson/Canon

About The Cartridges
The electronic chips on the cartridges today do not measure the level of ink in the cartridge! It is merely glued onto the cartridge and has an ink shot countdown register. Each time you print or clean the print head it reduces the number of ink shots available. When the register is zero it says there is no ink even if the tank is full. The chips installed on the ciss systems are auto reset chips. The countdown register is stuck on full so it cannot count down and therefore the cartridge will never report that it is empty.
Ink Feed
The cartridges are kept full of ink because they suck the ink via a ribbon tube from the external tanks. The external tanks must stand on the desk level with the base of the printer. Raising it higher will cause the ink to gravity feed into the cartridges and leek into the base of the printer.

How Much Ink is Left?

Since the cartridges are always full and the software also says so you now check your external ink tanks and top those up with ink when needed.

So How much Can I Save?

If you have standard cartridges installed and have to replace one cartridge e.g. black, you will generally have to clean the heads to get the ink flowing properly again. When you do this the head clean also rapidly counts down the ink shots in the other cartridges and you will have to replace those in a short space of time as well.
With a ciss system this won't happen since the cartridges are always full and since they are not removed you will only have to run the head clean on rare occasions.

Aside from this, bulk ink is substantially cheaper. The average cartridge possibly only contains about 8ml ink. A 100ml bottle of ink cost less that a standard cartridge. You can figure your savings!

Manufacturer's Don't like These Systems!

Epson printers are generally easy to install, you just remove your existing cartridges and drop the ciss cartridge set in position. Ensure that the ribbon tubes run freely and that is about it.

Canon however have included some trickery that needs to be overcome.

The ribbon tube feeding the cartridges from the ink tanks will not allow the cover to be closed properly. Canon has a cover open switch which can be easily disable with a roll of paper or presstick. They have figured you will easily get past this an so it appears they have installed a light sensor in the printer. When this is activated it won't allow the cartridges to be recognized. This applies only when a new cartridge is installed. To bypass this check the light must be shut out on the first pass of the new install. Once it is happy no further rejections will occur.

Canon printers have a cover open switch that needs to be disabled. When the cover is open it gives a 6502 error. That is easily overcome .